Robert Scoble blogs about Onfolio 2.0. Looks like I am going to have to look at this news aggregator which integrates with Firefox. Look very interesting.

Nice screenshot here.

…is now available for download.

A job to be left for the weekend, I think. An impresive new wiki has been built to house the documentation, using the Mediawiki engine.

A terrible thing has happened. I rushed home this evening to finish off the last few pages of A Prayer for Owen Meany, only to find that it has gone! Vanished! I cannot find it anywhere! I am appalled, aghast and upset.

So much so, that I had to start reading The Wasp Factory immediately to get over it. It’s a shame though, because …Owen Meany was shaping up to be a genuine 5 star read.

An interview with some top WordPress guys on version 1.5 which is hopefully imminent.

tesco_VCard
Originally uploaded by theclosedcircle.

amner on Palimpsest emailed me this. How sweet and generous of him!

The cover of the Independant was rather amusing on Friday:

edit: have just thought, wouldn’t it be good if paper front pages were always like this? It would be much easier to decide whether or not to buy the thing…

Interesting interview with John Naughton on his blog.

Great piece from The Times on Arthur Miller, written by Erica Wagner. Thanks to John Naughton for the link.

Why the 20th century was the century of Arthur Miller

His dramatisation of the 17th-century Salem witch trials has continuing resonances

PERHAPS the 21st century will be remembered as the American century; although just now, at its outset, it is hard not to think that this may be for all the wrong reasons. And if the same could be said, perhaps more kindly, of the previous 100 years, it would be fine to consider that this might in part be because it was the century of Arthur Miller, too.
His life spanned both, of course; and did not begin until 1915, when he was born to Polish-Jewish immigrants in Manhattan. His father, Isidore, made ladies’ coats, but his business failed in 1928 and the family moved to Brooklyn, across the East River. From Death of a Salesman to The American Clock, this scene of the sudden reversal of fortune was one that Miller the playwright — after he had served his apprenticeship working with his father, then as a shipping clerk in an automobile parts warehouse, and later, at the time of his first marriage, in the Brooklyn Navy Yard — would revisit again and again in his work. Of this time, the time of his father’s failure and the Great Depression, he once said: “It was hard to know where my own family situation left off and where society began. It was all happening right there in the living room.”

That was, in a sense, his great gift: that it was all happening right there in the living room. Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge — these are not great plays because of the political statements that they make, although the themes they embody are still as pertinent as ever. They are great plays, and works of art, because they are human stories of enduring power that live, and live again, through their characters.

When Death of a Salesman made its Chinese-language debut in Beijing in 1983 there was some doubt as to how well Chinese audiences — mostly raised on socialist morality plays — would understand Willy Loman’s story, however well-disposed they might be to the tale of a man broken on the capitalist wheel. However it was Loman’s relationships within his family that drew them in — and that make the play what it is, for any audience, anywhere. Miller ’s third wife, Inge Morath, recalled that a woman came in to watch the play in its Beijing rehearsals and broke down in tears at Linda Loman’s inability to save her husband. “It’s the same situation,” the woman said.

Miller himself knew failure — his Broadway debut, The Man Who Had All the Luck, opened on November 23, 1944, and closed after four performances. The play, the tale of a struggling garage mechanic, was such a mess, apparently, that one critic left “confidently expecting the final curtain to come down upon the spectacle of everyone on the stage squirting seltzer siphons at one another”. But All My Sons came just three years after this failure, and when Death of a Salesman opened in 1949, the 33-year-old playwright won a Pulitzer prize. Another reversal of fortune, one from failure to success; the American dream made flesh — and then even more so when Miller married Marilyn Monroe in 1956. The marriage lasted only five years, but if America was to be seen through the Hollywood lens, why should not one of its greatest writers be drawn into that world too? Hollywood was the heart of that America as much as Miller was.

But three years before his marriage to Monroe The Crucible had opened on Broadway. This dramatisation of the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts in the 17th century has continuing resonances — Miller himself referred to the comparisons that could (and could not) be made with the witch trials when Kenneth Starr brought Bill Clinton to book.

“Salem purified itself nearly to death,” he wrote, “but in the end some good may have come of it. I am not historian enough to assert this as fact, but I have often wondered if the witchhunt may have helped to spawn, 100 years later, the Bill of Rights, particularly the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits forcing a person to testify against himself — something that would have stopped the witch-hunt in its tracks.”

And, by the same token, the Salem trials would be the cause of Miller being able to resist testifying against himself when, in 1956, he appeared before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee because he was named by Elia Kazan (who had directed All My Sons and Death of a Salesman on Broadway). The two men had both attended communist meetings; the following year Miller was found guilty of contempt of Congress (a conviction later reversed) for refusing to reveal the names of members of a literary circle that was suspected of communist affiliations.

So this was America too: a place of freedom and a place of orthodoxy. Miller’s life, and his work, seemed to contain it all. His later plays never brought him the acclaim of his earlier work, but that matters only in the present moment, the moment of newspapers and critics. The moment of history, the moment of literature, is longer, and lasts. What is of worth will be remembered, and what Arthur Miller brought not only to America but to all the literate world — both his passion and his polemic — will always be remembered.

In the East London school where my husband teaches, the students who read Death of a Salesman weep as much as I did when I first saw it, and as did that Chinese woman in a rehearsal studio in Beijing. Call the 20th century Miller’s century: a time and a man to trouble us, to inspire us, to call us to question each other and ourselves.

Erica Wagner is Literary Editor of The Times

What a terrible shame.

ABC News: Playwright Arthur Miller Dies

Transcript of a talk by my favourite living novelist on (one of) my favourite dead novelist(s).

Here.

Roy Keane has confirmed that he’ll be retiring when his contract runs out in 18 months’ time.

Obviously, as a Forest fan, I’ve followed Keane’s career over the years, and I have to say I have never felt much antipathy for him since he left us. I’m just pleased that he has come back and proved so many of his critics wrong this season. There was an excellent write-up about his resurgence in The Guardian earlier this week.

Well, my trial has finished on FeedDemon, and at the moment I’ve decided not to go ahead and cough up, mainly for one very good reason: BlogLines, which suits me better because it is more portable. If I had a laptop or tablet PC, I would stick with FeedDemon, because it’s a great piece of software. But I do my blog reading at work, largely, and don’t have time at home. So being able to access by feeds from anywhere is a big bonus for me.

It’s a shame, in a way, because I really liked the system.

Another great column today from Bob Cringely, this time on the subject of the resignation/firing of Carly Fiorina as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

Usually I come up with my own column topics, but sometimes readers simply demand that I write about this or that. This week, the pull is coming from two different directions — those who want a take on the Toshiba-Sony-IBM Cell Processor announced this week, and those who want my reaction to the firing of Carly Fiorina as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. These would seem to be very different topics, but if you stand far enough away and squint, they look nearly the same. The Cell Processor represents a technical revolution that is about to take place in high-tech business, while Carly Fiorina represents management that was poorly prepared to lead or even adapt to that revolution. It was a smart move to let her go, though the real test for HP’s board will be finding a proper successor.

John Naughton blogs the subject here.

Computer Weekly reports that large companies are being warned off switching to Firefox.

The Gartner report said Firefox’s growth, so far, was “unsustainable” as many of the features that had made it popular were primarily aimed at individual users not businesses.

A simple case of FUD?

Better news, however, is that Yahoo! are offering a version of their toolbar for Firefox users, as reported by MediaPost.

The initial Firefox toolbar is specifically designed for Windows, and will not include Yahoo!’s spyware-fighting Anti-Spy tool, which was added into the Internet Explorer toolbar last year. A company spokeswoman said that Yahoo! plans to build Mac OS X and Linux versions and extend Anti-Spy to the Firefox toolbar in the near future.

Yahoo!’s search blog cautioned Thursday that the beta has some wrinkles that need smoothing. “Like any Firefox extension, it may cause your browser to misbehave in unexpected ways,” reported Duke Fan, Yahoo! toolbar product manager.

In my absence I have been deluged with comment spam.

Comments are now moderated, but I hope to get to them quickly. Not that there are terribly many…

Interesting post on Wikimedia here.

Google Inc. has made a proposal to host some of the content of the Wikimedia projects.

The terms of the offer are currently being discussed by the board. The developer committee has been informed of some of the details via email. A private IRC meeting with Google is planned for March, 2005.

Please note that this agreement does not mean there is any requirement for us to include advertising on the site.

More details will be put here when the offer is allowed to be made public.

Could this be a case of Google taking the fight to Microsoft? MSN Search, of course, offers recourse to Encarta.

I haven’t touched this thing for ages. Apologies all round. Have been shockingly busy at work and at home recently, and the PC at home just hasn’t been turned on for days now.

Am also neglecting Palimpsest, which is naughty of me.

Been doing a fair amount of reading today about organisation and suchlike, both personally and for at work. Here’s some of the stuff I have come across.

Moleskine notebooks – these seem cool, if pricey. Loads of links about them here.

43 Folders – this seems to crop up all over the place. Originally based on David Allen‘s book Getting Things Done. It’s a title that has been picked up and used on this blog describing various tricks and stuff to help keep efficient. There’s a Google group too.

[The] title, 43 folders, refers to the number of manila folders required to build a physical tickler file system.

Twelve monthly folders and 31 daily folders are used to build a rotating, one-year “look ahead” system. Maintained daily, it’s a powerful lofi hack for never forgetting to do something (and, consequently, not having to worry about forgetting to do something).

It beats (or at least complements) your electronic calendar in at least one way by letting you store hard-copy items like cards or bills in the folder associated with any day between now and a year from now.

Cornell note-taking system – as described here. This seems like something I really need to take up during meetings:

Read this over the weekend. Here’s my review for Palimpsest.

So Now Who Do We Vote For? is a 160 odd page ‘book’ from John Harris, erstwhile editor of the excellent but now sadly defunct indie magazine Select and occasional Newsnight Review-er.

It details his discontent with the current Labour government, and asks the question of whether it would be a good idea for disaffected Labourites to take their vote elsewhere, for one election only, to try and force a change in the party’s thinking.

The reasons for Harris’ loathing of New Labour stem largely from Iraq, which is barely touched upon, because, as Harris says, we all know the arguments already anyway. The main thing that raises his ire, though, is PFI, especially in schools and hospitals. Those two subjects get a chapter of their own, in between Harris’ examinations of the potential suitors for Labour protest votes.

Those two chapters make the book worth buying alone. Harris tells the story of the first PFI hospital in qhich during an operation a window blew open(!). Why weren’t the windows clinically sealed? The contractors found it was cheaper to install normal double glazing, glue them shut and, er, take off the handles. Great. It soon becomes clear, as if it wasn’t already, that there is no room for profit in a universal healthcare system.

In many ways, the problems facing schools are even more frightening. Harris focuses on the ‘City Academies’ set up by a Christian Evangelist car-dealer, called Peter Vardy, whose schools teach creationism and ban Harry Potter from the school library. What makes things worse is the way that local authorities and the government collude in getting these academies foisted on communities when they are really not wanted.

Another chapter focuses on the current state of the Labour party, and here Harris interviews an unnamed ex-Minister, who advocates voting for the Lib Dems to shake Labour up and force Blair out. But what, asks Harris, if that means the Tories get in? The response is to question whether that would really be any worse than a third New Labour term. Because, as the ex-Minister points out, a vote for Labour out of loyalty, or out of the lack of an alternative, will still be considered by the leadership as a vindication of the New Labour project. Harris also talks to Hazel Blears, who he used to know as a young party activist. She doesn’t come out of it very well at all, sounding like the sort of Blairite robot we have come to know and love, completely missing the point on various occasions. At one point she genuinely sounds like a bitter old Tory hag, and I will look this up when I get home and quote it in full – it is bewildering that it comes from a Labour MP. Roy Hattersley is next up, and while he is hardly in favour of Blair, his advice is to stay loyal and hope that Gordon takes over soon.

Of the targets for protest votes, the Lib Dems come across as wishy washy as ever, Charles Kennedy’s prevarication and inability to give a straight answer is telling, though Lembit Opik comes across as a sound guy. A ‘rising star’ in the party, Mark Oaten, is more right wing than Michael Howard, and professes not to have had a political philosophy until after he had already been an MP for some years. Wha’???? The Lib Dems don’t seem to be opposed to PFI, and are even a little woolly over their opposition to the war. Harris comes to the conclusion that in trying to capture the votes of disillusioned Tory and Labour voters, the Lib Dems find themsevles covering the same old ground as the other two main parties.

The SNP, Plaid Cyrmu and the Respect Coalition get a brief going over, the latter the most amusing as Harris harbours an all to obvious loathing of ‘trots’, or headbanging socialist militants who had made his life in the party in the ’80s such a nightmare.

In the end, Harris concludes that you have to vote tactically. If your Labour MP voted against Foundation Hospitals, Tuition Fees and Iraq, then vote for them – at least they have some principles. If you have an arch-Blairite evil MP, but the challenge comes from a Tory, then vote Labour – don’t risk it. But if the challenge comes from anyone else, ie the Lib Dems, then give them your vote to shake Blair up a bit. Likewise, where Labour is third to Tories and Liberals, you should vote Liberal as a form of tactical voting.

To aid all of this juggling of votes, opinions and figures, a website has been created here.

Harris closes with a brief discussion of the merits of proportional representation. Like that will ever happen…

Well, I’m back at work now, yesterday’s abortive attempt notwithstanding. I’m also obvious back in the mood to keep this thing updated again, no doubt there was wailing and knashing of teeth the world over at my continued silence…